I can't describe how much I enjoyed reading Matthew Stewart's book, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. It isn't the easiest book I've ever read, to put it mildly.
Stewart dives deep into historical and philosophical waters in the book's 435 pages. At times I wondered why he was paying so much attention to a certain subject. But by the end of "Nature's God" I understood, pretty much, how each chapter contributed to his literary goal.
Which, basically, was to dispel the myth of the United States being founded as a Christian nation. Or more broadly, as a religious nation. In truth, this country was founded as an Empire of Reason.
I've written several blog posts about the book, here, here, and here. As with my first post, mostly filled with quotations from "Nature's God," I've done the same in this post -- starting at the point in the book that I left off with in the first set of quotations.
Stewart is just a freaking brilliant author.
Like I said, his book takes some effort to understand. You have to fit together a bunch of historical and philosophical pieces to get a good glimpse of the picture that is the foundation of the American Revolution and our constitution.
In the quotations below, I particularly enjoyed Stewart's discussion of how the founders of this country distinguished between private and public religion. This supported a post on my other blog, "Religious views have no place in fetal tissue debate."
Enjoy. Read slowly. Then consider reading the quotations over again. I've had to do this. Repeated readings sometimes are needed to really fathom what Stewart is getting at, for me at least.
All virtue, according to this line of thought, is a matter of pursuing one's genuine interest or self-realization. It supposes an awareness of oneself, and of every aspect of one's actual life, in the present. It is not far from what in the Buddhist tradition is called "mindfulness."
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More dramatically, Spinoza tells us that we do not desire or detest things because we judge them to be good or evil; we judge them good or evil because we desire or detest them.
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So the good always comes with reasons for its goodness; those reasons must refer to those motives that we generically identify as pleasure and pain; and those reflections on the affections can always be the subject of further reflection, elaboration, and qualification.
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A still deeper insight embodied in the radical conception is that our knowledge of good and evil, such as it is, cannot be replaced with a thoughtless calculation delivered by some moral theory on the basis of some fixed set of rules, for it must follow from our awareness of the interconnections of things in the universe as a whole, taken without limit.
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The radical philosophy at the origin of liberal modernity, then, is not properly speaking (or exclusively) a humanism. It is closer to a naturalism that might one day be expected to embrace all species, a planet, and perhaps the universe itself.
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Thus: to complete the logic: if vice turned out to be a condition of happiness, then presumably God would clamor to see us vicious.
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For good and evil are nothing but pleasure and pain insofar as we are conscious of them.
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If one were to rummage through the history of philosophy for the words that might express the moral wisdom at the core of American liberalism -- the knowledge that we realize ourselves individually and collectively not by bemoaning our depravity and abasing ourselves before inscrutable deities but through the improvement of the understanding that brings with it both pleasure and virtue -- it would be difficult to find a more apt phrase than the one Jefferson placed at the heart of the Declaration of Independence: the pursuit of happiness.
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But today we don't really need to wonder what a society founded on the principles of atheism would look like. We just need to understand aright the history of the United States.
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Liberalism in its original form is not the elaboration of some common moral intuition, the articulation of an arbitrary creed or cultural formation, or a theory of justice. It is a theory of power. Its principal claim is that the source of human power and freedom is the understanding. It rests in an essential way on the same radical philosophy that begins with Nature's God and passes through nature's virtue.
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The radical political philosophy that guided the American Revolution, on the other hand, begins not with this common assertion of the moral equality of human beings but with an explicit denial of the premise concerning the natural inequality of human beings. Human equality begins in nature, it says, not in moral imperatives.
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The demand for equality among beings that are naturally equal is really just the demand that all power should explain itself. A justice that comes from nature is in essence a justice that comes with reasons and is therefore subject to explanation and revision. It is this insistence on explanation -- not any moralistic imperative to be nice to other people, nor the appeal to arbitrary and unreliable feelings of empathy arising out of the human breast -- that would make the Enlightenment such a revolutionary force in human history.
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The Empire of Reason, to be clear, does not contain or restrict nature but realizes it, and so it is also, by definition, the most powerful form of state. It maximizes the freedom or power of the individual, insofar as we understand freedom or power as rational self-determination (as opposed to the satisfaction of passions). But the rational self-determination or power of the individual, as we know from radical ethics, is in fact coextensive with the rational self-determination of the collective.
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The radical freedom of thought begins with the claim that the mind is not in fact free to affirm or deny ideas at will, but is rather constrained to follow the evidence and reasons presented to it. The mind achieves its freedom, according to this line of thought, by pursuing reasons and evidence toward a more perspicuous understanding of itself, its own body, and the world around it. The mind needs its ideas in the same sense that the body needs to appropriate pieces of the outside world in order to generate itself.
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Not grasping that power is nothing but the understanding itself, human beings naturally tend to anthropomorphize it. Power, they tend to think, always belongs to the kind of thing that has a proper name. So they confuse the political power of their own collective with that of the king or institution that happens to wield it, in the very same way that they confuse the collective power of all things in nature with that of a presiding deity, to which they give the name of God.
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The common ideas about things make it especially difficult to see how it is that the sovereign, as distinct from government, may be identified with the people.
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The most obvious general principle of democracy is that it finds one way or another to give all individuals an equal voice in public affairs.
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The common religious consciousness supposes that right belief alone is the foundation for right action, and so it concludes that good religion is the necessary foundation of good government... The radical philosophers, on the other hand, say that understanding, not belief, is the source of all morality, and that the reasonable state embodies this understanding in its laws.
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America's founders were functionally unanimous in their conviction that good government starts with human beings as they are -- mostly irrational and hence vicious -- and produces virtue by relying not on acts of conscience but on acts of law.
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Tyranny happens when a society turns against itself, with one part usurping the power of whole and applying it to the exploitation of the rest.
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The opposite of the Empire of Reason is in reality the Empire of Faith. Hobbes calls it "the Kingdom of the Fairies"; in more modern terms, we could say that the opposite of democracy is theocracy.
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Thus, superstition permits individuals suffering from one set of passions to feed off individuals suffering from another according to a logic that neither side understands, and in this manner society lacerates itself in a fury of thoughtless self-destruction.
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No proposition could have elicited more support from the radical precursors to the American Revolution than that the priests are the chief instrument of tyrants.
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Human beings achieved self-government only after they learned how to discard the politically dangerous delusions that arise from the common religious consciousness. At least, that is more or less how America's founders saw the matter.
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The equality that Jefferson announced and that Lincoln partially advanced is at bottom the demand that all power must explain itself. In reality, the revolutionary force in the Declaration of Independence is the guiding principle of philosophy.
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Every thing in the universe strives to persist in being, say the radical philosophers, and the power of nature through which the human mind strives to persist is the power of the understanding.
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From the radical position that Locke and Spinoza share, it follows that religion is not a fundamental category of human experience for legal or political purposes in either its public or its private aspects.
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The separation of church and state that emerges from the early modern revolutions in philosophy and politics does not in fact imply that the modern secular state is or ought to be neutral with respect to religion in every sense of that term. Rather, this separation at least implicitly involves the creation of a certain kind of public religion.
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This new public religion is indeed tolerant of every religious belief -- but only insofar as that belief is understood to be intrinsically private. It does not and ought not tolerate any form of religion that attempts to hold the power of the sovereign answerable to its private religious belief. It also does not and ought not tolerate any attempt to shield the doctrines and practices of any religion from critical scrutiny.
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In short, the state may adopt as a part of its public religion only whatever may be safely dissolved back into reason.
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The important point is that such false religion remains confined to the private sphere, as a purely inward matter, where it is rendered harmless by the same civil laws that forbid the state from attempting to interfere with it.
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It is precisely because they identify religion with its purely private or inward aspect that Jefferson and Madison insist that government can neither restrict nor impose it through an establishment of religion.
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It alerts us to the fact that behind the definition of religion as a purely private affair there stands another religion, or a sense of piety, and this object of this ur-religion, or true piety, is not any particular deity or doctrine but the pursuit of understanding itself.
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In short, they [the founders of this country] wanted to bestow upon America the blessings of popular deism, or that variety of religion that translates into lively metaphors and memorized rituals the radical and essentially atheistic philosophy on which the modern liberal state rests.
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Jefferson was certain that priestcraft and its paraphernalia of mystifying dogma would wither under the disinfecting light of the new empire of reason.
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The popular deism or natural religion that America's revolutionaries hoped to promote was distinguished above all by its commitment to the defining value of the Empire of Reason: the improvement of the understanding.
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It is only to the degree that religion is not what it once was, moreover, that we can and ought to tolerate it, and may hope to find in it some limited utility for modern society.
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America's mainstream religion is at bottom one form or another of popular deism, and popular deism is just atheism adapted to the limitations of the common understanding of things. To say that the United States is a "one nation under God" is to conceal behind a euphemism the fact that it is and always has been one nation under nature. Whatever else we pretend to believe, we are in practice mostly atheists now -- and for that we should be grateful.
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The best account of the spread of secularism remains the one that Jefferson first suggested: that it is the natural consequence of the freedom of thought in a free society. Not the orbits of the planets or the origin of the species but the daily movement of social, moral, and political experience in the modern world has made secularism inevitable.
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To attempt to explain the world today through the experience of the common religious consciousness is to live in a kind of moral chaos. It is to inhabit a house of fractured mirrors, where submission to inscrutable authorities counts as freedom, where that which is good for the health of the individual and the collective is called evil, and where all are expected to bear the lifelong burden of pretending to believe one thing while doing another.
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Once upon a time, it took a certain kind of genius to see that atheists could be virtuous. Today, only those blinded by bigotry can think otherwise. The revolutionaries of the early modern period needed their books to imagine a world free from the chains of the common religious consciousness. Today we need only our eyes.
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Ideas are acts of understanding. They derive their power from their truth, not their acceptance. They involve clearing away old delusions, not erecting new ones. They don't settle the future; they only make sense of the past. They are the ground of our freedom, not an instance of it. And the history of the past several hundred years shows that ideas in this sense did change the world.
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Self-governance became possible -- however imperfectly -- only after radical philosophy cleared the field of those common misconceptions through which human beings participate in their own enslavement.
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But the fact remains that the common power of humanity -- the capability for cooperative action that is really just another word for our moral well-being -- was never greater than after we lost our religion.
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The main thing we can learn now from the persistence in modern America of supernatural religion and the reactionary nationalism with which it is so regularly accompanied is that there is still work to be done. For too long we have relied on silence to speak a certain truth. The noise tells us the time has come for some candor. It points to a piece of unfinished business of the American Revolution.
I found this very interesting, challenging to say the least to my "common sense" understanding. Are morals subjective or objective?
Posted by: Frank Haynes | August 18, 2015 at 08:46 AM
Frank, that's a big question. Here's a pertinent quote (p. 283) from "Nature's God" that does a pretty good job of summarizing the transcendent vs. immanent approaches to morality -- which sort of line up with the objective vs. subjective question.
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"The common view, say the radicals, begins with the valid intuition that the good cannot be something that fluctuates according to every change in fancy of an arbitrary will. It must come with reasons, and those reasons must be found in our understanding of things as they are, not as we wish them to be.
However, the common view -- misled by those common misconceptions about the self and mind with which we are already familiar -- goes on to suppose falsely that because our idea of the good does not involve an arbitrary affirmation of the will, it must therefore be a fixed property of things in themselves.
In effect it multiplies the errors of the common conception of mind, for it imagines that the good exists independently of our all our reasons for thinking that it is good, in the same way it imagines that our representations stand before consciousness independently of the reasons for which we hold them true.
Yet in taking this extra step toward an imaginary certainty, the common view destroys the very insight with which it begins. In direct violation of the guiding principle of philosophy, it renders the good an arbitrary feature of the world, a motive independent of all motives, a cause that can move us without itself answering to any other cause, something we are obliged to do for no other reason that that it is good to be good.
The immanent conception, on the other hand, stays longer with the insight at the core of the common conception. It, too, says that there are always reasons to be good, and then it further insists that we can always continue to reflect on those reasons, and ask why the good is good.
In keeping with the guiding principle, it says that whatever moves us, like whatever moves anything in the infinite universe, must be explicable. So the good always comes with reasons for its goodness; those reasons must refer to those motives that we generically identify as pleasure and pain; and those reflections on the affections can always be the subject of further reflection, elaboration, and qualification.
The inherent intelligibility of moral life, in other words, rules out the very possibility that arbitrary dogmas, creeds, or acts of faith can ever be more than provisional and revisable by-products of a moral life. Those who misguidedly maintain that there is some good independent of all our motives, according to this radical critique, do not in fact succeed in creating one.
They simply read their own motives into the things themselves and confuse their limited perspective with a fixed fact about the world. In establishing some imaginary authority outside of themselves, they really only oppose themselves to themselves, and the vaunted certainty of their conviction serves chiefly to mark the tenacity of their ignorance."
Posted by: Brian Hines | August 18, 2015 at 10:49 AM